Session Summaries; Vol. 12: The Sea Witch @ 26 Nov 2006 10:15 am by Kevyspice
Took out the remainder of Black Molly’s crew and returned to Freeport.
More flavor text to come…
Session Summaries; Vol. 12: The Sea Witch @ 26 Nov 2006 10:14 am by Kevyspice
After Ivan recovered his strength and woke back up, the party stayed up late into the night swapping stories with him, and finally turned in to get some rest before tacking the mystery of the darkened lighthouse. The next day, a message arrived addressed to the leaders of Poisson, demanding a ransom of 50,000 gold pieces for control of the lighthouse to be returned to the village. Ivan pointed out that the author of the note, one Black Molly, was a sea hag known to be a vicious pirate who led a crew of ogres and had a reputation for leaving few captives alive.
As Black Molly must have known, the village leaders had no way to come up with the exorbitant ransom, so the group renewed their promise to investigate the matter. They decided to rest up during the afternoon and evening, and to approach the lighthouse under cover of darkness sometime between midnight and dawn. They made sure to fix the location of the lighthouse, roughly a quarter of a mile out to sea, in their minds before sunset, so as to avoid missing the thing in the dark. Confident that they could find the structure later, they swapped more stories with Ivan and headed to bed.
Thick fog had moved in by the time they awoke, so they were sodden when they finally arrived at the lighthouse by means of Richard’s wind walk spell and some careful navigation. They positioned themselves beneath an overhang at one end of the island so that they could discuss their options out of sight of the lighthouse. While the rest of the group remained insubstantial, Balama materialized and tried to hide as best she could before summoning an arcane eye to survey the situation in the lighthouse. Unfortunately, although she tried to cast quietly, her voice carried in the fog. The group heard a couple of deep voices talking at the top of the lighthouse, and watched as a cask of oil smashed to the ground, followed by a dropped torch.
The party watched silently as a pair of ogres emerged from the lighthouse and made a circuit of the small island on which the structure stood. Apparently seeing nothing out of the ordinary, the ogres went back inside and closed the one door to the lighthouse.
Alarmed at the close call, Balama had to calm down for a moment before sending the arcane eye toward the lighthouse. A quick look revealed a couple of ogre guards at the top of the tower, a few more in various rooms inside the lighthouse, three inert humanoid forms in a room on the third floor, and Black Molly herself poring over a set of nautical charts in a library on the third floor. These revelations set off another conversation amongst the group, which again brought unwanted attention from the ogres in the lighthouse. This time, however, the ogres were more persistent in their search of the island, and forced the party into acting.
Spike and Richard slowly materialized out of their insubstantial forms to surprise the pair of ogre guards who were menacing Balama, while Chow wafted to the top of the tower to assess the situation there. After Spike and Richard make quick work of the ogres, Balama grabbed the two sailors and used a dimension door spell to step instantly into the library. Unfortunately, Black Molly had moved elsewhere in the building, leaving a couple of ogre henchmen to greet the party. Chow materialized by the side of the lighthouse and soon joined the rest of the group by kicking in the library’s window.
The pair of ogres in the library fell quickly, so the group headed out to search the rest of the third floor. Another couple of ogres put up some resistance in the adjacent room to the right of the library, while Chow heard pottery being smashed in the room to the left. During the fight among the oil cisterns in the next room, the party heard one of the huge bells at the top of the lighthouse begin tolling. Not sure of the bell’s portent, the group resolved to finish clearing the lighthouse as quickly as possible. As though summoned, Black Molly chose that moment to make her appearance.
The sea hag charged from a door at the other end of the cistern room with another pair of ogre henchmen. She shot vile looks at the party as she closed with them, but Spike, Richard, and Balama shrugged and glared right back. Spike in particular seemed to feed off the hag’s rage and finally seemed to shake off the slump that had affected him for the past few months. Within moments, numerous ogres lay dead by his hand and he turned his attention to Molly. The hag attempted to flee up the stairs, but Richard stepped into the doorway and calmly blocked her progess with a conjured wall of stone. The trapped pirate tried again to harm her attackers with her evil eye and claws, but she succumbed quickly to the party’s combined magic and steel.
Meanwhile, Chow, remembering that Balama had seen the slumped humanoid forms in the room where pottery was still being smashed, headed back through the library to check on the lighthouse keepers. As soon as he opened the door from the library, he had to dodge a crossbow bolt from the ogre on the other side of the room. Ignoring numerous other bolts, Chow dragged the bodies of the lighthouse keepers away from the oil fire that the ogre had previously set. In the meantime, the rest of the party closed on the ogre and slew him without incident.
The group moved quickly to put out the fires with the bags of sand conveniently placed in the room for just such an eventuality, while Richard checked on the lighthouse keepers. Two had died in the fire, but Richard managed to heal the third well enough that the man could walk.
A quick sweep of the lighthouse turned up no further opposition, but while they were investigating the lookout loft at the top of the tower, the party heard the distinctive splash and swish of oars. Telling the lighthouse keeper to stay put, they scrambled outside and arrayed themselves to meet whatever was approaching through the fog.
Session Summaries; Vol. 12: The Sea Witch @ 26 Nov 2006 10:12 am by Kevyspice
Well rested after their ordeals from the previous few days, Spike, Richard, and Balama visited their usual contacts to investigate the available options for bringing Chow back from his boat on the Black River of the Dead. Richard already had the ability to raise the recently dead, but the destructive magic that had dessicated Chow would require even more powerful magic to negate. Peg-Leg Peligro suggested that an old pirating acquaintance of his, an aged dwarf named Ivan Blackfathom, might still be found distilling rum in the small fishing village of Poisson, some distance southwest of Freeport. The dwarf’s name struck Richard as somewhat familiar, and Peg-Leg verified that Blackfathom was indeed a longtime follower of Harrimast who had brought countless scalawags to the faith. Given the circumstances of Chow’s demise in continued defense of Freeport, the retired dwarf might be convinced to perform a true resurrection, provided the party could come up with the 25,000 gp in diamonds necessary to complete the spell.
Will Teach informed the group that they would face similar costs if they could even find a wizard able and willing to wield the reality-warping spells necessary to bring Chow back by arcane means, as the magics involved tended to drain significant amounts of the caster’s own lifeforce. As he knew of no wizards in Freeport with such a degree of learning, he suggested looking to the mainland, perhaps in the capitals of Eisen, Montaigne, or Castille.
The group decided almost immediately to visit Ivan Blackfathom, and so set about calling in favors and selling off some of their more powerful magical loot in order to secure the requisite pile of diamonds. In the course of their month of fundraising, the group also made some progress toward a couple of longer-term goals and tied up some loose ends that had been bothering them for a while.
Spike discovered that deposed King Albigensius IV of Avalon, whom the party had raised after his assassination at the Last Resort, had apparently been removed forcibly from the throne by his cousin Cosmus as a result of intractable religious differences. It seemed that Albigensius was a devout follower of Naryne, the Dark Sister, the goddess of nobility. Cosmus, himself a devotee of the Great Church, which revered all the Lords of Heaven, had used Albigensius’s faith to whip up the peasantry in a mostly peaceful populist revolt against the “haughty upper crust who only seek to keep themselves in power at the expense of the common man.†Given the circumstances that led to the former King’s ouster, Spike found himself somewhat less disposed to offer aid to the man in the future.
While asking around town about the situation in Avalon, Spike also happened to talk to Will about what was going on with K’Stallo/Thuron. The former High Priest of Tinel had set about repairing and refurbishing the sunken Temple of Yig beneath Black Dog’s caves on the north end of A’val. He had eventual hopes of restoring civility and sanity to the surviving degenerate members of his race, and was employing the Jade Serpent and the various other artifacts of Yig to that end. Will intimated that it would be unwise to approach K’Stallo at this critical juncture, but that when the priest thought the serpentfolk were finally ready to make contact with the people of Freeport, he would appreciate the Freeport Four acting as emissaries between the two potentially hostile groups.
Meanwhile, Kolter made contact with the party again, letting them know that he was ready to try arranging sources for the materials he needed to produce the spiffy black explosive powder he had demonstrated for them months earlier. He already had contacts for the charcoal and sulfur he needed, but did not have a line on the quantities of saltpeter he would need. He occasionally managed to pick up limited amounts from the Wizards’ Guild and various alchemists around town, but those dribs and drabs were not nearly enough for sustained production. He said that the substance generally could be extracted from swamps, from beneath the guano in caves that housed large groups of bats, or from beneath the mounds of droppings that accompanied large populations of birds. When he mentioned this last possibility, the group immediately thought of the tribe of aarakocra whose scouts they had rescued from the strange pirate slaver several months ago. Kolter seemed excited at the possibility of reaching some kind of arrangement with the birdmen, and asked the party if they would be willing to accompany him on a trade mission. They agreed, and set off within the week.
The aarakocra greeted them cordially, and after some lengthy negotiations agreed to let the party or their employees visit the island twice a year to mine saltpeter in exchange for a suitable amount of gems, metal spearheads, and other trade goods. The birdmen also pointed out a few nearby islands with bird populations sizable enough to generate saltpeter. In celebration of the new trade agreement, the party and the aarakocra shared a feast that evening, including a Heroes’ Feast from Harrimast provided at Richard’s magical request.
Kolter, quite pleased with the party’s performance, offered them another potentially lucrative trade opportunity. He had approached the Freeport Admiralty with an idea for mounting larger guns on ships, and they seemed receptive after a couple of demonstrations. To move to the next phase of the operation, Kolter needed to make contact with one or more bellfounders, to see if they could tweak their manufacturing processes to produce stronger, elongated bells, called “cannon,†to his specification. He didn’t know of anyone in Freeport with the capability to make such things, but he knew that ships’ bells had to come from somewhere. He had the names of a few people on the mainland, and asked the party if they’d be willing to accompany him when the time was right. Again, they agreed fairly quickly. Spike, Richard, and Balama had recently decided to make a grand journey to numerous ports around the Inworld Sea both to establish trade contacts and simply to see more of the world around them, so Kolter’s plans seemed to fit in seamlessly with their own, at least for the time being.
By this time, Peg-Leg had used his divine magic to make contact with Ivan Blackfathom and confirm that the dwarf was indeed still alive in Poisson, and that he was willing to cast the true resurrection to bring back Chow, as long as the party provided the necessary diamonds. To that end, the group had managed to sell Spike’s Mace of Terror and Chow’s Dagger of Venom and convert the proceeds into a large, carefully guarded sack of gems. Thus prepared, the group set off to Poisson.
They arrived at the small fishing village an uneventful three days later and met Ivan at Seamus’s Tavern. The ancient dwarf said that upon further consideration, he’d agree to bring Chow back on two conditions: one, that the party would investigate the Poisson lighthouse, which had gone dark a few days earlier, and two, that the party would take Ivan and most of his stock of rum back to Freeport. He planned to leave the distilling business in the hands of his assistants and return to his homeland, and Freeport was the first step in the that direction. The group agreed immediately, and offered to do him one better by taking him to his hometown as part of their grand tour. He got a bit misty-eyed and said that a last great voyage sounded perfect, and that even if he didn’t make it back to his homeland, having a deck under his feet for a few weeks would be worth it.
After a few minutes lost in thought, Ivan led the group to his office. He removed diamonds by the handful from the sack that the group handed him and arrayed the gems into a vaguely humanoid shape on an empty table. Without further preamble, he began his ten-minute entreaty to Harrimast to return Chow from wherever he had ended up after his silent boat ride with Mormekar. As the casting progressed, the diamonds on the table began to dissolve into gray smoke that gradually coalesced into Chow’s mortal form. Chow coughed once and opened his eyes in time to see Spike and Richard catch Ivan as the dwarf collapsed unconscious to the ground. They relocated the priest to a cot in the back room and returned to check on their friend.
Chow told Spike, Richard, and Balama that while he had had several enlightening and fulfilling conversations with his ancestors during his sojourn to the afterlife, he was glad to be back. He thanked his compatriots for sacrificing their time and material wealth to bring him back for more adventures with them, and told them that if similar actions should unfortunately become necessary in the future that he would do anything in his power to repay the favor.
Session Summaries; Vol. 11: Shadows in Freeport @ 26 Nov 2006 10:10 am by Kevyspice
The party’s investigations regarding Chow’s eventual resurrection bore little immediate fruit, so they decided to push on and finish clearing Cresh Manor after an evening’s rest. They faced no opposition as they entered the manor and descended into the cellar. Taking care to walk in the middle of the hallway, they entered the alcove that Richard said contained some kind of transportation magic. One by one, they emerged in a strange pentagonal room that featured a door in each of the five walls and a stone pillar in the center of the room.
The group could discern no opening mechanism for the doors, but guessed that the five dials mounted atop the pedestal probably had something to do with them. Noting the twenty-six numbers that surrounded each dial, the group deduced that the dials needed to be set to particular values to open the doors, and worked quickly to solve Cresh’s little puzzle. When they turned the last dial to what they guessed should be its correct position, a brilliant light flashed in the room, and the party found themselves standing in a summoning circle on the floor at one end of a large cave.
At the other end of the cave, they saw a black-robed figure silhouetted by the sickly purple glow of a pulsing disk of energy emanating from a small metal box on the floor. Dozens of people lay bleeding and groaning on the ground around the box, while numerous demons on the other side of the gate writhed and tried to push their way into the cave. The black-robed figure, presumably Cresh himself, informed the party that they were too late to save Freeport and summoned a huge spider to occupy them while he busied himself around the gate.
The group dispatched the summoned creature without much trouble and turned their attentions to Cresh. Richard enclosed him in a zone of silence while Spike and Lumineaux approached along the walls of the cave. Fleeing the silence, Cresh ran around behind the gate. Richard wasted little time in sending a hailstorm after the fellow to prevent him from casting, but winced when he noticed a rather dramatic decrease in the amount of groaning coming from the people behind the gate.
Noting Spike and Lumineaux approaching with missile weapons drawn, Cresh placed a wall of wind between himself and his attackers. The two looked at each other across the cave, shrugged and kept going.
At this point, the relatively straightforward seek and destroy mission turned messy as a massive demon strode through the gate, crushing several prone townsfolk beneath its clawed feet. Richard tried a couple of times to send the thing back to its home plane, but the demon laughed and shrugged off the magical effects. Richard and Isaac gave ground before the demon, but it pursued them back toward the hermetic circle and the cave walls beyond. Richard uttered a final prayer to Harrimast as the demon’s pincers ended his life, but mercifully did not live to feel his skull being crushed underfoot as the thing turned its attention to Isaac. The former marine captain got in a final couple of crossbow shots before the glabrezu closed with him, but they bounced ineffectively off the demon’s hide.
Meanwhile, Spike had his hands full with a pair of small demons that had emerged from the gate. One of them, a small creature resmbling a cow, emitted a foul gaseous belch that dissipated almost immediately in Cresh’s wind wall. Lumineaux closed with Cresh, but not before he had drawn his rapier and finished off a couple of unfortunate townsfolk. Balama helped Spike with the demons attacking him and made her way around the gate to help Lumineaux and to try to stay out of the glabrezu’s reach.
With their concentrated attention, the party managed to kill Cresh before he slew any more citizens. At this close range, they noticed that the man appeared not to be completely alive anymore, but they didn’t have time to wonder what would have happened if Richard had tried to turn him. Balama quickly snagged Cresh’s former possessions, grabbed the corpse, and levitated into the air. She used the wind wall to propel herself over the gate, yelling, “Here he is!†at the glabrezu. She threw the body at the demon, who grabbed it in midair, bit clean through the torso, and jumped back through the gate as Cresh’s limbs fell to the floor.
Now that the immediate danger had passed, the group hurried to collect their fallen comrades and assemble on the hermetic circle. During the fight around the gate, they had noticed that the floor seemed somehow to be moving toward the gate itself. The motion wasn’t quite enough to interfere with their footing during the fight, but it was noticeable. Now, however, the rock walls, ceiling, and floor were draining quickly into the open gate.
Standing on the circle, Spike, Balama, and Lumineaux uttered what they hoped to be the trigger word to get them out of the cave. They appeared back in the pentagonal room, which itself seemed to be draining downward. They rearranged the dials on the pedestal to read “L-E-A-V-E†and appeared back in the teleportation alcove in the cellar beneath the house. Again, the stone walls seemed to be melting into the floor, so they ran down the hallway, up the stairs, and back out of the house. From the front gate they watched as Cresh Manor shrank and collapsed into itself, eventually disappearing with a loud “POP†into the ground, leaving no trace that it was ever there.
Catching their breath, the party headed to Finn’s office at the Halfling Benevolent Association. Finn thanked them for cleaning a blight from his beloved Eastern District, paid them the agreed-upon amount for services rendered, and threw in a large diamond for use in raising Richard from the dead. To that end, Spike, Balama, and Lumineaux escorted the remains of their fallen comrades to the temple of Harrimast. Exhausted, they then went to their various beds and collapsed.
Session Summaries; Vol. 11: Shadows in Freeport @ 26 Nov 2006 10:08 am by Kevyspice
Chow checked the door for traps and, finding none, opened it. The room beyond appeared to be Cresh’s summoning chamber, judging by the giant pentagram and magic circle scribed into the floor. Chow, somewhat sick of the manor’s disturbing decor, headed to the north wall to cut down the obscene tapestry hanging there. Before he could finish, a tangle of sticky web dropped from the ceiling and trapped him in the corner of the room. The rest of the party reacted quickly to the new threat, with Richard summoning a whirling wall of tiny razors to confine the huge insectoid demon on the ceiling while Spike, Balama, Isaac, and Lumineaux tried to dislodge the creature and free their comrade.
When the bebilith squeezed itself into a corner of the room from which it could strike the party in the doorway, they retreated back up the hallway to regroup at the crossroads. Richard dealt quickly with the poison the demon had inflicted on Chow and Isaac, and the group decided without much discussion to conclude their exploration for the day. They headed back into town to purchase some supplies (most notably anti-toxins) to help in tomorrow’s assault, hashed out some plans, and retired for the day.
The next morning, the party was a bit surprised and more than a bit relieved when Richard managed to send the demon back to its home plane before they even entered the room. As it departed, the thing telepathically growled something guttural at the party, which Will later explained was the closest approximation to “Thank you†that existed in Abyssal (something like “at least now I don’t have to consume you,†or “you will not die by my hand todayâ€).
Still fresh and ready for action, the group searched the room for hidden exits, eventually finding small keyholes in the walls behind the blasphemous tapestries. Chow picked the locks without trouble, and Spike backed him up as he opened the doors. The eastern door led to a short passageway with another crossroads and what looked to be a temple or shrine beyond, while the northern and southern doors led to small alcoves. Richard analyzed the bones jammed into the north alcove, but (surprisingly, given the locale) didn’t find any indication that they would animate in any sort of undead parody of life.
The floor, walls, and ceiling southern alcove appeared to be covered with tiny, intricate handwriting that could not be deciphered from the summoning room. Chow stuck his head into the alcove for a better look, but before he could report his findings to the group, he seemed to disappear in the massive column of flame that engulfed the alcove. The party, suddenly more awake, searched and called for their companion in the cellar, to no effect. Muttering curses at Cresh and the sordid, disgusting business that his demense had drawn them into, the rest of the group decided to push on and finish their investigation, hoping that Chow could fend for himself wherever he’d been teleported, whether on this plane or the next.
They moved on to the intersection past the summoning room. Hearing nothing at the closed door to the north, and electing to save the three alcoves off the southern passage for later, the party approached the temple to the east. When they got close enough to discern the statues of writhing demon-women flanking the bloodstained sandstone altar at the other end of the room, they heard familiar oozing and farting noises emanating from between the rows of pews. At the first sight of another group of the Unspeakable One’s animated tumors, the party retreated into the hallway. Balama sent a fireball into the room with the dual purposes of torching the pwalgs and maybe damaging the temple itself. Richard created another blade barrier in the aisle between the pews, effectively pinning the remaining pwalgs for Spike and Isaac to deflate with arrows and bolts.
While they waited for the pwalgs’ noxious emanations to subside, the group heard a faint noise at the other end of the cellar complex. Still in battle mode, they crept back into the summoning room and arrayed themselves for an ambush. Fortunately, they recognized Chow’s shouting voice as he approached. He reported that he had been undamaged by the flame strike trap, but had been teleported to the front steps of Cresh Manor. None the worse for wear, he accompanied the rest of the party to the temple to look for hidden exits. Finding none, the group headed south to investigate the three alcoves at the end of the hallway.
Uneasy about the leering demon faces carved into the rock at the end of each alcove, the party discussed their options. Chow inspected the floor to the left of the intersection, and finding no signs of a trap, he decided to check for a hidden door in the demonic visage. As he took a couple of steps into the short hallway, though, the party watched in horror as the rogue’s flesh seemed to dessicate and collapse into a pile of ash, which itself dissipated into the air, leaving only a pile of equipment behind.
When their initial shock passed, the group quietly collected Chow’s things and said a brief prayer for their fallen comrade. Richard asked Harrimast for the ability to detect magical auras, and quickly deduced that the trap that took Chow had reset itself, and there seemed to be another trap of similar power in the opposite alcove. The southern alcove, however, looked to contain some sort of teleportation magic, though Richard could not get a read on a destination.
Rather than continue into further danger in their shaken and distracted states of mind, the party trudged back to town to mourn their friend and investigate any possible options available to bring him back to the world of the living.